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I’m halfway through season one in my six season quest to get into the Champions League. If you missed part one, you can read it here.

I’m going to give half seasons updates so this will end up in a 12-part mini-series.

So, after assessing the 27 players I had at my disposal, I opted for a 4-1-2-1-2 formation or 442 diamond for simplicity. We didn’t have any natural right wingers, which is something I will look to address in January. For now, Gardner and Bryne are assigned that position.

The start of the season started well and we hit the joint top spot with Cambridge within the first three games. We did get knocked out of the EFL cup on penalties to Swindon, but my aim is promotion so I wasn’t to bothered. We were scoring, winning and conceding only twice in the first seven games.

Then September hit and a draw against our toughest opponents to date would see Latics draw the next seven matches, conceding and scoring only two goals in that time.

We were creating chances, but none of the strikers could find the back of the net enough

We’d dropped to fourth, and with morale dipping, I saw the Checkatrade Trophy round two match as a chance to shake things up!

I made 11 changes, some tactical tinkering and a formation shuffle to 4-1-3-2. I gave the fringe and youth players that game they needed to prove themselves – again we drew but won the penalty shootout out 3-1.

It stopped the draws, although we did lose the next match. I had found a new midfield pairing of Maouche and Missilou over Baxter and Fane. Maouche would go on to bag three goals in his next six games, with three man of the match performances to boot.

After that loss, we went nine games unbeaten and qualified for the Area final of the Checkatrade with a 2-0 win over Crewe.

We remain in fourth, two points behind third-placed Grimsby and 11 points off top spot at the start of the winter window.

Iversen has been indispensable, I’ll definitely be looking at trying to extend his loan or try and tie him up for longer come to the end of the season. We have lost our leading goalscorer Lang back to Wigan but Duffus has returned back to the club.

Our youth academy is growing and looking like we have a few gems there already ready for the first team.

It’s the first of January and I’ll be assessing the squad in full, I definitely need firepower bringing in as we’re the lowest scorers in the league, and if we are to go up this season, goals are what is going to be the difference as our defence is solid.

Hello, I’m Ian, and I’ve been handed the task of taking Oldham Athletic to the Champions League in six seasons!

Yeah, you read that right…six seasons!!

If you didn’t know we put a Twitter poll out of various Fifa19 challenges:

The winner by some distance was Oldham to the Champions League.

So, having last played Fifa17, and not picked up the PS4 pad for a while, I’ve set myself on the professional level – we’ll see how it goes.

Now I have a little system that I feel works for manager type games, and I’m hoping it pays off one more time. I’ve disabled the first transfer window, as I want to see what I’ve got in my team for the first half of the season at least. So no incomings until January, which I’m hoping I don’t need as I bid to build the bank for later seasons.

The board have set the following objectives for the season:

Win League Two

Get to the last 32 of the FA Cup

My first course of action was to hire two scouts for my youth academy, this is going to be vital in the coming seasons. With the 1.4million budget I’ve got, I need to rely on youth coming through and also start to become a feeder club to bring in the money for when I hit the Championship and Premier League.

I feel like I’ve got two decent scouts to start off with; One with experience and one with judgement. I’ve set them both a 6-month assignment in England and Scotland to find the best out there they can…so we’ll see come Jan.

My formation is going to be determined with the players I have to hand, I like either a 433 or a 442 diamond with my wingers way out wide, a holding midfielder and a player with the free-range behind the front two – a little old school but I prefer it.

I currently have a squad of 27 players, in January I’d like to trim that by a couple. I like to have two in each position, ideally a first-team starter and either a youngster or an older player as a backup. I also like to have 2 utility players who can play a number of roles in defence and midfield.

On first glance it’ll seem two out of my six strikers will be earmarked to go in the winter window, and possibly a left back.

We’ve just entered a preseason tournament with the prize money set at £1.3m. We have Accrington, Antalyaspor and Yeni Malatyaspor in the group stages, I’m quietly confident we can claim one of the two qualifying spots to progress through.

I should have a clearer idea of the formation path I want to go down after the tournament before season one starts…